When the Muse Hits: 2013

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Mystery Quilt

I've wanted to make a quilt for years, and my husband has been telling me I should take up quilting (he knows not what he says). So when someone posted on AQ about a mystery quilt, I said, what the heck. Now, my only experience with quilting so far was one pillow. And that ended up smaller than it should have because my seam allowances were off. No, I do not have a 1/4" quilting foot. Still don't.

Anyway, the mystery quilt is designed by Bonnie Hunter and can be found here:

Bonnie is using orange, green, yellow, blue, and neutrals. However, anyone who knows me knows I can't stand orange, and I don't care for yellow and green much more. So I went with purple (big shocker, I know), blue, fuchsia, and green. It took me four different stores to find the fabric and a friend to get me the tool I needed for part 1, but then I was rocking.

It turns out that cutting out 376 triangles is very tedious. Very, very tedious. I'd cut for an hour. Take a break. Cut for another hour. Take a day-long break. (Luckily for me at this point, I still didn't have all of my fabric so I had good excuses for not cutting all of it out.) To be honest, I was still cutting out little triangles as I was finishing up sewing the first set of pieces. It turns out that it's also hard to keep track of exactly how many triangles you have cut. Here is Calvin with about 85% of the needed triangles.

Luckily, once I started sewing, it went faster. I have created a guide on my machine that is giving me pretty accurate 1/4' seams. (I still need to get a quilting foot since the whole tape and cardboard thing I have going on is a pain every time I need to reload the bobbin.) I love sewing things that I can sew in chains. And with only a couple technical issues, I soon had all of my triangles done. :)

My first square

Chain sewing

Part I complete!

Here are samples of where everyone else is: Monday Link-Up